


Beatrice

by TheOriginalSuki



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, F/M, Fix-It, World Between Worlds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:22:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22833223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOriginalSuki/pseuds/TheOriginalSuki
Summary: You can't lasso a star.  But you can give in to gravity.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 32
Kudos: 72





	Beatrice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [englishable](https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/gifts).



_"Hell is a small place." -- Bishop Robert Barron_

**Inferno**

Ben Solo has been the prisoner of his own mind for as long as he can remember. Voices drew him down and in, plunging him to the depths with phantom hands. His fatal flaw is not that he listened. His fault is that he believed.

Or rather, did not believe. Not worthy, not loved, not redeemable.

_You_ are _a monster._

_Yes. I_ am _._

Does one fall to the Dark if one is never in the Light to begin with? Still, there were moments of clarity; he cannot let himself forget: his mother's laughter when he tangles her braid with sticky fingers; the Millenium Falcon rearing up around him, breathing like a colossus, his father in the copilot seat; the first time he held a light sabre, like reuniting with a long-lost limb. It makes what was taken from him all the more brutal.

**Purgatorio**

After residing for so long in the cold and dark, the girl bursts onto his horizon like a wayward sun -- he can't look directly at her, or he'll go blind. Still, some part of him waiting to wake starves for light. So he offers to teach her. Ben is a fool, because that is not how one woos a celestial body. As if he could lasso a star. It is only fitting that _she_ brands _him_. 

Through some micro mercy -- or perhaps a cruel cosmic joke -- everything he sees, everything he knows, now filters through her to him. He splits, Janus-like, his attention drawn in two directions. One, the Dark and his grandfather and his _I-can't-go-back_. The other, the Light and her obdurate refusal and her _you're-not-alone_.

It's as though she cracks open a window in the close cave occupied by his soul. Sometimes she comes in and sits there with him. Sometimes she draws him out. He doesn't care which, as long as he can keep her.

For one intractable instant they stand on two ends of a cosmic see-saw. And she doesn't try to change him, and he doesn't try to change her; and they just _are_ , and it is right. But he gets greedy. He makes a move toward her. She jumps off. Abandons ship. The balance tips irrevocably.

He chases her across star systems.

_You're hard to get rid of._

His mother used to read to him, sometimes, when he was still little. In her sequined evening gowns and robes of state; before stepping out for an evening to a gala or a fundraiser. He remembers a book about a little furry animal called a rabbit, who wanted to run away from his mother. He changed his shape to elude her. But each time he did, she changed too. _I won't let you go_ , was the moral of the story. Ben used to wish, in the soft core of his rotten self, after the Jedi temple fell, after the Knights of Ren, after everything ... he wished his mother would chase him, too.

It's what he wanted so it's what he does.

And when at last things are made clear, he will make one final transformation, for _her_. The memory of his father is there, a seed planted when he offered up his life. His father trusted it to take root and grow and make itself known at the appointed time.

After all, what is death but the final transformation?

**Paradiso**

In the end, climbing out of the darkness into the light isn't as hard as Ben thought it would be. It is his first real choice, free from influence, free from consequence. There is nothing he can do at this point to save his own life. But he can give her hers. And that, that is a choice he can lean his whole self into. A choice he can own.

"Ben..."

He didn't do it for reward, although -- he would relive the struggle over and again, just to hear her christen him. The girl --Rey -- kisses him. And his brain cracks open wide. The hammer of a higher God smashes his small cosmos. The universe floods in, broader and brighter than he dared dream.

He has nothing to give her but his smile.

***

"Look," she says, "are you coming or not?" She has to bristle a bit, because she needs to concentrate to reach him and she has already started to cry.

Though he knows -- knows it the way one knows every note in a cherished refrain -- she has every intention of dragging him out if dares refuse. He has watched from the space between, watched her sifting, gathering, unravelling. Wending her way to him. With that dogged determination that lights her from the inside out.

You can't collar a star, he thinks. But you can give into gravity. 

Her form is rigid and her eyes a-glow and the set of her jaw is a declaration. It says, _I won't let you go_.

**Author's Note:**

> "How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos..." -- G.K. Chesterton
> 
> The book mentioned is a popular children's book by Margaret Wise Brown titled "The Runaway Bunny."
> 
> Explicit nod to "Janus" by englishable. Go forth and read.
> 
> Special thanks to @acowlorsomething here and on tumblr for answering my myriad questions. And to @magpie-trove on tumblr for the Star Wars meta and unfiltered idea-mongering.
> 
> For a brief but substantive overview of Dante's Divine Comedy by Bishop Robert Barron, go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7pnwF084Z4
> 
> Also on tumblr as @theOriginalSuki


End file.
